Amazing grace

John Newton is an old man now, half blind, dictating his letters in a London parish, and he still cannot get over it. Decades earlier he had walked the deck of a slave ship, a captain in the trade, a trafficker in human beings who counted his cargo in souls and called it commerce. The mercy that hauled him out of that life never grew ordinary to him. To the end he kept one sentence near, that he had once been a wretch and a great sinner and the LORD had saved him anyway. He was Paul's confession turned personal, that Christ came into the world to save sinners and he was the chief of them. So when the gospel was recovered in his century, it did not stay shut in treatises and arguments. It broke into song. Newton put his astonishment into a hymn the whole world would one day sing, a hymn about grace so amazing it could find and pardon a man like him. And he was not alone in it; Watts and the Wesleys were doing the same, setting the rescued gospel to melody. Some mercy is too large to merely think. It has to be sung.

Grace can shrink into a doctrine you hold correctly and feel nothing about. Newton is the antidote. He never let the wonder cool into mere agreement, never stopped being amazed that the hands that had chained others had themselves been unchained. That astonishment is not decoration on the gospel; it is a sign the gospel has actually reached you. A man can recite that Christ saves sinners and never once tremble that he is one of them. Newton trembled, and the trembling turned to music. There is a difference between the person who knows about mercy and the person undone by it, and the difference often shows up exactly here, in whether the knowing ever becomes song. Note too what his past did not do. The depth of where he had been became the depth of his gratitude; the LORD did not author the evil of that ship, but He reached into it and pulled a man out and made him a herald. Grace that has truly landed does not stay quiet. It sings, and it cannot quite believe its own good news.